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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Proposing things is free after all, and few of the politicians of 2024 will be there in 2040 to be called about it, and even if they are, they can blame it on previous office holders and whatever...

This is as "trustworthy" as the "Only sell EVs by 2035" EUs proposal, and Musk's mission to Mars.

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OTOH, it could be as trustworthy as the Montreal protocol of 1987 which agreed to reduce CFC production by 50% by 1999.

Instead production in signatory countries hit 0 by 1996.

Measured scepticism is rational. Blind scepticism isn't.

Those were just specific substances for which they had a replacement at hand (and those HCFC and HFC replacements? Turns out they're not so good for environment either, and they had to start restricting those too, though they're still going strong).

Not for something general, like overall polution, of which there's 0 chance to reduce to 90%, or even 50% by 2040.

Let's wait and see who called it.

50% is trivial. It's already down 33% from 2012.

The top three air pollution sources are electricity generation, heating and transport. There are zero emission replacements at hand for all 3, all being actively deployed.

And pollution from electricity generation are 46% down in only 7 years, 2016-2023.

Reduction by 55% from 1990 levels (with no flimsy items counted into this such as sequestration) by 2030 is now seen as below-inertial scenario: emissions will be lower even if nothing else is done. We are already about 35% under 1990 levels. So you are certainly wrong on that one.

It's not blind, it's based on reasoning.

CFCs were replaced fairly easily with HFCs (which also contributed to climate change. GreenAmerica says `They were replaced by hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which do not deplete the ozone, but they do have up to 9,000 times greater warming capacity than carbon dioxide.`)

What's the alternative for fossil fuels?

Even if we increase production of nuclear energy and renewables, we're still left with cars. Electric cars require tons of lithium and after the battery did its course they lose a good chunk of their value. The economics in EV are just completely different compared to petrol cars and that's doable only if you are wealthy.

Electric cars require about 8kg of Lithium, and that's easily and economically recyclable.

An EV with thermal battery protection lasts about 250,000km, about the same as a gasoline car.

You can buy an EV that has passed European safety homologation (the BYD Seagull) for $8,000 in China. The TCO of that is obviously a lot better than a gasoline vehicle. The fact that you can't in Europe or North America is not due to economics.

Indeed. Most coal will be phased out of Europe by 2035 [1], and could run entirely on renewables by 2030 if they choose to spend accordingly (~€2T, not terribly feasible but gives an idea of fiat-time tradeoff) [2], leaving buildings (heat pumps [3]) and EVs [4] to sweep out quite a bit of the remaining emissions (with manufacturing, agriculture, and other sources still needing solutioning [5]).

[1] https://beyondfossilfuels.org/europes-coal-exit/

[2] https://www.euronews.com/business/2023/10/09/europe-can-beco...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/23/heat-pum...

[4] https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/new-registr...

[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1240108/road-transportat...

sorry but this is not realistic. i looked at the [2] document and it's just a dream.

it's written in the style of "currently EU consumes this much energy, we project this to grow to that much until 2030/2040, we currently produce this much energy from renewables, so we need to multiply the amount of renewables with the correct number".

completely ignores the largest problem with solar/wind, storage. it just says that we should build enough storage. that's easy to say. i don't know of any country on this planet that made it work with purely solar/wind (please just tell me which one does, bonus point for one with a similar climate to europe), so it means we need to literally develop the technology (pls note, we do not even know what that technology will be) and then deploy it... in 6 years. that's completely unreal.

also, they recommend that we let the nuclear power generation go to zero, arguing for example, that nuclear-fuel needs to be imported into europe, but seems to be totally fine with importing in anything else (rare earth minerals etc.)

You are looking at individual countries. Europe has a transmission network, as well as battery storage, pumped storage, hydro generation, wind, solar and some nuclear. You keep adding renewables and storage, and keep retiring fossil generators. Europe has enough wind potential to power the entire world, for example. It's not impossible, it's math.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map?wind=false&solar=false

https://www.energy-storage.news/europe-reached-4-5gw-of-batt...

That doesn't help when you have a big storm, sunless/windless winter or any other combination of factors covering big area. Plus fragility of the supply, limitations of power lines and network, etc. As soon as you add more real life factors it doesn't look that promising. To have a potential doesn't imply to have a feasibility.

I have nothing agains further improving the network and load-balancing it smarter, but it's just in my interest to have some local duplication of energy generation. Or with my heatpump being out of service I may freeze or will have to buy a generator.

I don't disagree, fossil gas generators will be the last fossil generators to go (gas peakers and oil are already uneconomical compared to battery storage [1] [2] [3]). We're just arguing time horizon and deployment trajectories [4]. Certainly, don't tear down efficient fossil gas generators until they're no longer needed, but keep building renewables, storage, and transmission like our lives depend on it, because they do.

[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/12/battery-storage-syste...

[2] https://assets.cleanenergycouncil.org.au/documents/resources...

[3] https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...

[4] https://electrek.co/2023/11/20/world-may-be-on-track-for-tri...

Citation: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-02-07/the-ga... | https://archive.today/9YQIP ("Bloomberg Opinion: Big Gas Needs to Be a Backup; Instead of a Bridge, Utilities should emphasize their role of keeping the lights on when renewables can’t and pivot away from a reliance on increasing volumes.")

There has never been a one-hour window over the last 30 years where it hasn't been sunny or windy somewhere in Europe.

Obviously having all of Europe's electricity being generated on a single corner of Spain isn't feasible. But nobody is talking about 100% wind & solar. Hydro, storage, geothermal & nuclear can all add diversity and reliability. This can be modelled. We cannot get to 100% reliability but nothing can; local distribution SPOF bottlenecks limit reliability 99.99% regardless. And 99.99% is possible.

Given SpaceX's amazing progress in 2023 (and every year before) I'd bet the Mars mission is going to happen.

People don't seem to realize that in 2023 they broke the record for most amount of launches of any entity on earth. They beat the second best record (Soviet Union at 60 launches in a year). His Falcon heavy updates broke the record for most amount of cargo delivered(beating Saturn V).

The rate they are iterating on Starship means they may make their targets on that ship this year.

The private sector has made incredible progress in getting this green initiative done. While the investments in EVs and batteries have definitely helped, a lot of this rhetoric based targets have gone nowhere. Just look at the results of COP21. I was there in Paris. It feels like such a long time ago now.

The real question is why these initiatives fail? Maybe its just not possible to have the entire population transition over to a new way of thinking about emissions. After all what are emissions? They are an unaccounted for externality. Some percentage of the population cannot make their lives/businesses/operations work if they have to account for this cost.

Sooo your solution is to just do nothing at all?

My solution to the problem of pollution, or to the problem of vaccuous promises by politicians which is what I pointed at?

You believe so and criticize it.

To do what? If nothing happens it wasn't worth it to point it it.

So apparently you care enough about this topic to complain were is your solutions than to add something useful to it?

Hum... no. The GP is complaining that what is on the title is the equivalent of doing nothing at all.

Of course, there's an entire plan, with shorter term goals and ways to achieve them. With actionable steps, what is a huge change from most climate accords. The article just does a very bad work of citing those and not getting at any detail at all.

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